taoburga

Karma: 141

Studying Behavioral Decision Sciences at Brown University, specialized in rationality and global catastrophic risks. University group organizer at Brown EA and the Brown AI Safety Team (BAIST).

Interned at CHERI, where I researched interventions to improve institutional decision-making (IIDM), and at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where I researched an intervention to improve moral decision-making from a utilitarian perspective.

Facilitated Intro EA and AI Policy reading groups at Brown.

Self-published Flores Para los Muertos, a book which contains some of what I’ve written (fiction & philosophy). In Spanish.

taoburga 23 Nov 2022 22:29 UTC
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in reply to: Renan Araujo’s comment on: List of Interventions for Improving Institutional Decision-Making
Thank you for the update! I will add this to the post as soon as I can. I find it very exciting that so many constitutions have included legal protections for future generations. Even if it hasn’t influenced policy yet, it could serve as a means of justifying longtermist policy once enough momentum has built up.

Edit: changes made.

taoburga 11 Apr 2024 21:04 UTC
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in reply to: Clare_Diane’s comment on: Reasons for optimism about measuring malevolence to tackle x- and s-risks
Thanks Clare! Your comment was super informative and thorough.
One thing that I would lightly dispute is that 360 feedback is easily gameable. I (anecdotally) feel like people with malevolent traits (“psychopaths” here) often have trouble remaining “undiscovered” and so have to constantly move or change social circles.
Of course, almost by definition I wouldn’t know any psychopaths that are still undiscovered. But 360 feedback could help discover the “discoverable” subgroup, since the test is not easily gameable by them.
Any thoughts?

taoburga 21 Mar 2024 20:49 UTC
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in reply to: mcnificat’s comment on: Effective language-learning for effective altruists
Glad it was useful!
I don’t feel qualified to give advice on teaching a language to small kids, although I do have a few thoughts. Please take them with a grain of salt, as I’ve never done this.
I’m assuming you mean your kids, not kids in a classroom? If this is the case:
- It seems like language interaction is important for kids, so I’m skeptical of the “having them watch cartoons in TL instead of NL” approach, unless they already have a solid understanding of the language.
- Do you speak this language yourself? If so, you could try to increasingly only speak this language with your kid. E.g., my cousins grew up strictly speaking French with their mother, German with their father, and English in school. Now they’re fully fluent in all 3.
- If you don’t speak the language yourself, I’d bet it’ll be much harder to make it happen. You could send them to private lessons (depending on age and disposition). You could also try to hire a caretaker/nanny (again depending on age) that speaks the TL and is willing to speak with the kid in that language. I knew a couple of people who spoke decent Spanish because they had a Spanish-speaking nanny growing up.
That’s all I could think of. That said, I think a quick Google/YouTube search might uncover much more valuable guidance on this!

taoburga 21 Mar 2024 20:36 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Denis ’s comment on: Effective language-learning for effective altruists
Thanks for your comment! I also think EAs sometimes fall into the trap of not considering their own interests and things that make them happy as much as they should. The importance of personal interest and enjoyment in language learning is hard to overemphasize.

taoburga 23 Nov 2022 22:32 UTC
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in reply to: Dasampo’s comment on: List of Interventions for Improving Institutional Decision-Making
I’m glad you found it valuable!

taoburga 27 Apr 2024 22:25 UTC
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on: AI-nuclear integration: evidence of automation bias from humans and LLMs [research summary]
Please feel free to add comments or ask questions, even if you think your question is probably already answered in the full manuscript. I have no problem answering or pointing you to the answer.

taoburga 10 Apr 2024 20:59 UTC
1 point
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on: Free Tabletop Exercising Course and Resources
Thank you for this! These are great resources; I’ll dive into them when I have the time.

taoburga 6 Dec 2022 2:19 UTC
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on: What psychological traits predict interest in effective altruism?
Thank you for researching this; this is incredibly valuable.
I noticed that the OUS-Impartial Beneficence subscale correlates well with expansive altruism and effectiveness focus. Maybe I skipped over it, but did you include in your results whether this OUS subscale had higher predictive power than your two new factors?

taoburga 24 Nov 2022 16:40 UTC
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in reply to: PCO Moore’s comment on: List of Interventions for Improving Institutional Decision-Making
Thank you for writing this. This is a really useful insight that I’ll be thinking more about as I engage more with IIDM — I have definitely focused disproportionately more on adding good processes than eliminating bad ones. This could be because I’m not very familiar in general with common processes within institutions, as my studies have really only focused on individual decision-making/rationality so far.
Below are a few quick thoughts on that.
Following your Putin-EU example, I wonder how much of Russia’s nimbleness is enabled by one man having so much decision-making power, which might both enable quick decision-making as well as democratic backsliding.
Although you could argue that quicker experimentation might pay off in the long run, I would worry that modern states having too few checks and balances might increase the risk of solo actors making catastrophically bad decisions. At the same time, I worry about vast bureaucracies failing to make important decisions, and that being equally catastrophic.
I agree, as you say, that the need for “caution and consensus vs. experimentation and accountability” depends on the institution and the decision to be made. I’m also not aware of attempts to describe when exactly you would want more of the former vs. the latter.
If you (or others) have good resources on eliminating bad processes/bureaucracy, I’d love to see them.

taoburga 24 Nov 2022 6:47 UTC
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in reply to: Agustín Covarrubias’s comment on: List of Interventions for Improving Institutional Decision-Making
Thanks. None of the internal links transferred from Google doc so I missed a few when manually creating them here.

taoburga 23 Nov 2022 20:20 UTC
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in reply to: mlsbt’s comment on: List of Interventions for Improving Institutional Decision-Making
Thanks for the feedback! I don’t have access to my computer right now but I’ll try to fix that when I do.